Digital holography has been experiencing a rapid growth over the last several years, together with the availability of cheaper and better digital components as well as more robust and faster reconstruction algorithms, to provide new microscopy modalities that improve various aspects of conventional optical microscopes. In an effort to achieve wide-field on-chip microscopy, the use of unit fringe magnification (F˜1) in lensfree in-line digital holography to claim an FOV of ˜24 mm2 with a spatial resolution of <2 μm and an NA of ˜0.1-0.2 has been demonstrated. See Oh C. et al. On-chip differential interference contrast microscopy using lens-less digital holography. Opt Express.; 18(5):4717-4726 (2010) and Isikman et al., Lensfree Cell Holography On a Chip: From Holographic Cell Signatures to Microscopic Reconstruction, Proceedings of IEEE Photonics Society Annual Fall Meeting, pp. 404-405 (2009), both of which are incorporated herein by reference. This recent work used a spatially incoherent light source that is filtered by an unusually large aperture (˜50-100 μm diameter); and unlike most other lens-less in-line holography approaches, the sample plane was placed much closer to the detector chip rather than the aperture plane, i.e., z1>>z2. This unique hologram recording geometry enables the entire active area of the sensor to act as the imaging FOV of the holographic microscope since F˜1. More importantly, there is no longer a direct Fourier transform relationship between the sample and the detector planes since the spatial coherence diameter at the object plane is much smaller than the imaging FOV. At the same time, the large aperture of the illumination source is now geometrically de-magnified by a factor that is proportional to M=z1/z2 which is typically 100-200. Together with a large FOV, these unique features also bring simplification to the set-up since a large aperture (˜50 μm) is much easier to couple light to and align.
However, a significant trade-off is made in this recent approach. To wit, the pixel size now starts to be a limiting factor for spatial resolution since the recorded holographic fringes are no longer magnified. Because the object plane is now much closer to the detector plane (e.g., z2˜1 mm), the detection NA approaches ˜1. However, the finite pixel size at the sensor chip can unfortunately record holographic oscillations corresponding to only an effective NA of ˜0.1-0.2, which limits the spatial resolution to <2 μm. While, in principle, a higher spatial density of pixels could be achieved by reducing pixel size at the sensor to e.g., <1 μm, this has obvious technological challenges to use in a large FOV.
More recently, a lensfree super-resolution holographic microscope has been proposed which achieves sub-micron spatial resolution over a large field-of-view of e.g., ˜24 mm2. See Bishara et al., “Holographic pixel super-resolution in portable lensless on-chip microscopy using a fiber-optic array,” Lab Chip 11, 1276 (2011), which is incorporated herein by reference. The microscope works based on partially-coherent lensfree digital in-line holography using multiple light sources (e.g., light-emitting diodes—LEDs) placed at ˜3-6 cm away from the sample plane such that at a given time only a single source illuminates the objects, projecting in-line holograms of the specimens onto a CMOS sensor-chip. Since the objects are placed very close to the sensor chip (e.g., ˜1-2 mm) the entire active area of the sensor becomes the imaging field-of-view, and the fringe-magnification is unit. As a result of this, these holographic diffraction signatures are unfortunately under-sampled due to the limited pixel size at the CMOS chip (e.g., ˜2-3 μm). To mitigate this pixel size limitation on spatial resolution, several lensfree holograms of the same static scene are recorded as different LEDs are turned on and off, which creates sub-pixel shifted holograms of the specimens. By using pixel super-resolution techniques, these sub-pixel shifted under-sampled holograms can be digitally put together to synthesize an effective pixel size of e.g., ˜300-400 nm, which can now resolve/sample much larger portion of the higher spatial frequency oscillations within the lensfree object hologram.
This super-resolved (SR) in-line hologram, however, still suffers from twin-image artifact, which is common to all in-line hologram recording geometries. In earlier work, the use of an iterative object-support based phase recovery method has been demonstrated to eliminate this twin-image artifact creating wide-field microscopic images of samples. This twin-image elimination method, however, requires as input the location estimations of the objects within the imaging field-of-view. To this end, a threshold or a segmentation algorithm can be used to automatically estimate the objects' locations (creating the object support) for relatively sparse samples. However, in denser specimens, this object support is difficult to estimate which can create challenges in removal of the twin-image artifact. For such dense specimens, a new approach is needed for pixel super-resolution holographic microscopy.